Dragontape Makes Awesome YouTube Mixes for Sharing

YouTube has more free music than any other service on the planet, simply because the site’s video ad rates are enough to cover the music licensing costs (or close enough to it, insofar as Google is concerned), which makes it a tremendous resource for listening and sharing. YouTube itself includes a simple mechanism for grouping those videos into playlists that you can embed anywhere, essentially turning YouTube into one big mix tape machine.

However, two problems exist with YouTube’s playlist feature, where music fans are concerned: The songs don’t play seamlessly, because each one needs to load before it plays; and, of course, the resulting mixtape can only include songs listed on YouTube.

A slick mixtape site called Dragontape has already fixed the first problem, and is working on the second.

“One big difference [between Dragontape and YouTube's playlist editor] is what we call gapless playback,” Dragontape’s Csaba Borbely told Evolver.fm. “We use a preload mechanism that gets rid of spinners and waits between clips. The second big difference is… we plan to add DailyMotion, Vimeo, SoundCloud, and other services as we go along.

“But really, the main thing is that Dragontape is much more focused than YouTube, or any of the other services. Dragontape is about giving a better (uninterrupted) user experience when you watch your clips at home or do a live YouTube party with friends.”

We’ve seen our fair share of sites that assemble YouTube into music playlists, and as mentioned above, YouTube itself has a playlist creator. But Dragontape is way slicker than any of those, allowing the playlist creator to drag-and-drop YouTube videos on a timeline, and the listener to toggle between the timeline view and full-screen video by merely ceasing to touch the keyboard and mouse. Another bonus: Dragontape can also create audio-only playlists out of YouTube videos (a feature we’ve seen YouTube block in other services, because audio-only playlists don’t display ads).